Offers innovative capabilities for monitoring network performance in the cloud leveraging both packet and flow data

SAN FRANCISCO – October 11, 2018–Riverbed®, The Digital Performance Company™, today announced the latest release of its Digital Experience Management (DEM) solution Riverbed SteelCentral, with advancements that dramatically improve the performance of cloud applications. The new release fundamentally changes performance management for cloud architectures with greater visibility of cloud native apps and into cloud-based networks—through the introduction of new Application Performance Management (APM) and Network Performance Management (NPM) capabilities. Today’s announcement further strengthens the industry’s most comprehensive DEM solution, which unifies device-based end user experience, application, and network monitoring to provide the business with a holistic view to truly measure and manage the digital experience.

Cloud adoption is enabling massive business transformation and tremendous growth for today’s digital business, but it also creates huge visibility gaps and span of control challenges for organizations. While hybrid architectures are a reality for most modern enterprises and cloud is now considered an extension of the enterprise infrastructure, the majority of performance management tools available in the market are incapable of providing unified and user-centric visibility for hybrid cloud environments and the user’s digital experience. In the 2018 State of Cloud Monitoring Survey recently conducted by Riverbed, IT network and cloud business decision makers shared their difficulties with 92% of participants stating they faced challenges with performance management in their cloud environment, and 60% of participants stated that their end users experienced cloud performance issues first before companies knew about them.

With this release of SteelCentral, Riverbed is introducing a new, comprehensive approach to monitor cloud performance that enables enterprises to monitor the digital experience of every application, in any cloud environment.

“As cloud adoption has become ubiquitous, cloud deployments and the applications themselves have become increasingly complex and distributed. Ensuring performance of the end-user experience, apps, networks and cloud vendors themselves is a daunting challenge,” said Mike Sargent, Senior Vice President, General Manager for SteelCentral at Riverbed. “This latest release of Riverbed SteelCentral delivers rich visibility into both the application and network performance of hybrid and cloud environments, as well as the most comprehensive approach to truly measure and manage the digital experience. With our end user experience focus and supporting big data platform, Riverbed SteelCentral is delivering end-to-end performance monitoring at a scale unmatched by any other vendor.”

“Public cloud continues to make inroads, with our research showing that 41% of enterprises are heavily using public cloud and 72% of those users are deploying in multi-cloud environments.[1] So, it is of no surprise that 60% of organizations anticipate that they will invest in cloud services monitoring and visibility over the next two years[2],” Rohit Mehra, Vice President, Network Infrastructure, at IDC. “The latest release of Riverbed SteelCentral offers companies a new and comprehensive approach for visibility into the application and network performance of hybrid and cloud environments. This is timely as we are seeing a rapid increase in the need for solutions that provide better cloud app performance and visibility.”

The new SteelCentral release features significant enhancements to its core solutions:

Packet visibility in the cloud – the new release of a AppResponse Cloud solution collects and analyzes packet information for Amazon Web Services (AWS) deployments.

Flow visibility in the cloud – SteelCentral NetProfiler’s capabilities extended to monitor flow across cloud environments and between the cloud and the enterprise.

App visibility for today’s cloud native apps – introduction of AppInternals integrations with Kubernetes, Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Red Hat OpenShift to help companies maintain visibility as applications are developed and implemented in the cloud, and manage the complexity of the modern multi-stack app ecosystem.

“CenterPoint's mission is to serve our customers' complex industrial property logistics and infrastructure needs as well as create sustainable jobs and build communities,” said Beverly Maestas, VP of Technology Operations at CenterPoint. “Our digital transformation initiatives are a critical component of this mission and leveraging the cloud is core to our strategy. Riverbed SteelCentral’s new capabilities will enable us to monitor our network performance across our hybrid environment and provide unified visibility into applications, logs, networks and systems. The resulting visibility to performance in the cloud will give us clarity into our initiatives and the impact they have on our customer base.”

The pressure from digital transformation initiatives has fundamentally shifted how companies develop, implement and manage their application environment. Not only do companies need to ensure that these business-critical initiatives realize their targeted benefits for the enterprise, but they need to do so in an increasingly portable, ephemeral environment. As companies accelerate application development with microservices architectures and composable applications, they are increasingly adopting solutions such as Kubernetes, Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Red Hat OpenShift for container and application orchestration and delivery.

“Over one-third of the Fortune 100 companies rely on Pivotal. Monitoring application performance accurately is the foundation of delivering high-quality software,” said Nima Badiey, Head of Technology Partnerships at Pivotal. “Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals for PCF delivers end-to-end insight into applications running on Pivotal Cloud Foundry. It preserves diagnostic details for executed transactions, even in large-scale enterprise deployments, helping users resolve issues before they affect customers and the business.”

New NPM Approach for Hybrid Cloud

This release introduces the first cloud NPM solution that can both look broadly across cloud network traffic and deeply examine cloud network interactions. Utilizing both flow and packet-based approaches to network performance management (NPM), companies can build on existing on-premises expertise but now extend it to cloud environments. New NPM features include:

The ability to implement the SteelCentral AppResponse virtual appliance as an Amazon EC2 instance in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

New reporting capabilities that enable companies to investigate cloud network performance in conjunction with on-premise network performance to provide an overarching view of the hybrid enterprise.

The extension of SteelCentral Agent to collect both packet and flow information in the cloud. This agent builds upon Riverbed’s single license strategy which enables companies to redeploy the agent across NPM, APM and end user experience management (EUEM).

[1] IDC CloudView, May 2018

[2] End User NPM Study, IDC, November, 2017

The Riverbed 2018 State of Cloud Monitoring survey was conducted by Dimensional Research, an independent research firm specializing inpractical market research to help companies make smarter business decisions. Over 300 IT decision makers with direct responsibility for network and cloud environments completed the survey. Participants came from the U.S., EMEA and APJ, working at companies with 1,000 – 5,000 employees and from a wide range of industries, job levels and cloud environments.

Riverbed®, The Digital Performance Company™, is united in our purpose of Advancing the Human Experience in the Digital World. Behind every digital experience is a human one, and Riverbed enables organizations to measure digital experiences and maximize digital performance so they can deliver better and more powerful human experiences— for customers, employees, partners, patients, and citizens. Riverbed’s Digital Performance Platform includes a combination of Digital Experience Management and Digital Networking solutions that ensure superior digital and user experiences, provides new levels of operational agility and accelerates business outcomes. Riverbed’s 30,000+ customers include 100% of the Forbes Global 100. Learn more at riverbed.com

Riverbed and any Riverbed product or service name or logo used herein are trademarks of Riverbed Technology, Inc. All other trademarks used herein belong to their respective owners.